Dodger Blues : Neighbors of Stadium Have to Field Traffic, Noise, Litter

Grace Acosta stood in her yard watching the cars climb the steep hill to Dodger Stadium. Year after year, she has seen the same bright stream of taillights, heard the same horns, the same yelling.

In the pink dusk, the cars move up the hill. Three hours later, when the neighborhood is dark and nodding to sleep, the drivers come roaring back, louder than ever. They’ve got beer in their bellies, adrenaline in their veins and Vin Scully blaring on their radios.

A few years ago, one wayward car even crashed through Acosta’s front gate.

“The noise!” she said, half-wincing, half-grinning as she looked out at the busy corner of Echo Park and Scott avenues on a night when the Dodgers were beginning their final home stand of the regular baseball season. “Sometimes I’ve got to close my windows! And if they win the pennant, it’s going to be worse.”

Like others in her blue-collar neighborhood, Acosta braces herself for about 60 Dodger night games a year--times when the streets are virtually overrun by baseball fans. The onslaught has been a rite of summer, like peanuts and spitballs, for almost 30 years, or since the Dodgers moved into the inner-city stadium at Chavez Ravine in 1962.

Dodgers’ attendance--always among the highest in major league baseball--is expected to surpass 3.3 million for the season in tonight’s home finale against the San Diego Padres, the 63rd night game out of 81 playing dates in Los Angeles. With the team scrambling to capture the National League Western Division championship, the figure represents yet another banner year for the home team, but another long, oh-so-trying summer for the homeowners.

“The streets are pretty filthy . . . because of the games,” said David Trujillo, chief field deputy for Los Angeles City Councilman Mike Hernandez, whose office catches complaints from the area like so many fly balls. “Coke cans, beer bottles, paper plates, newspapers . . . we’re talking about a trail from Dodger Stadium all the way down through the neighborhoods.”

Many of those neighborhoods have a downtrodden appearance, perhaps partly because of age and partly because of the traffic they endure. Small homes, duplexes and apartment buildings--many of them built in the 1950s, when the Dodgers were still in Brooklyn--line narrow streets where traffic and parking are chronic problems.

On the hills above Echo Park, where stadium lights cast a glow in the sky, many homes have spectacular views of lighted downtown office towers. Yet some of those same homes show signs of disrepair: overgrown trees, faded and peeling paint, narrow lawns with weeds. Despite a few pockets of affluence, the area has long been a home to lower-income immigrant populations, which are mostly Latino but increasingly Asian.

To many of these residents, the Dodgers are a source of pride, an identifying link with their new homelands. Others watch the lines of cars with weary resignation, as if wondering when it all will end.

There are times, near the crest of Scott Avenue and Stadium Way, when all 3.3 million fans seem to be driving past Jovita Carr’s home at once.

“Traffic! Traffic! Traffic!” she said as she tended her lawn just before the game Monday. On this night, a little more than 39,000 fans were on their way to the game, and Jovita was not one of them. But her husband, Henry, who has been ill, is a staunch supporter who follows every twist and turn of every season.

“If it’s not on television, it’s on the radio,” Jovita said. “He goes to bed with the radio on.”

He gets angry about the Dodgers only when they lose, she added. “He says, ‘They lost! They lost!’ ”

Rany Siv, 16, whose family moved into a small hillside home four years ago, has become accustomed to the cars and the noise. “When they come back from the game, they yell and scream,” she said. “They’re just happy. We’re used to it.”

Art and Yolanda Acosta, who live at the home that Art’s mother, Grace, has owned for 30 years, even look forward to the traffic. Many times they step outside after dinner--as they did on this night--just to see the great phalanx of cars.

“We like sitting out here and watching the people,” Yolanda Acosta, 35, said. “It’s interesting.”

Occasionally, there are traffic accidents. Sometimes, celebrities go by. The Acostas don’t know who they are, but they can tell by the cars--fancy limousines, Mercedes-Benzes.

On the nights the Dodgers lose, the departing cars seem to slink away quietly. But when the team wins, “They come down here honking,” Art said. “We stand out here (figuring out) who won.”

Ray Reyes, 21, a restaurant cashier who was walking on busy Echo Park Avenue, said the victorious crowds often roll down the windows to yell things like, “Go, Dodger blue!”

“That’s kind of nice,” Reyes said. “I like that. It’s fun.”

But Art and Blanca Salas, who were pushing their 4-month-old daughter, Maribel, along the same street, said the noise--which has grown worse--sometimes keeps them awake. “Man, it gets crazy,” Art Salas said.

Still, the large crowds make the sidewalks seem safe. And the baby likes to see the lights.

In yet another part of the neighborhood, press operator Alfredo Aguilar Sr., 38, tried to sound supportive of the Dodgers, but his words were a little bitter. As far as he is concerned, the traffic is one strike against the home team. Strike two came when he attended a game with three guests and it cost him $70 in tickets and refreshments.

Then, four months ago, Aguilar arrived home to discover that his van had been towed. He had forgotten that it was game night, and on game night, parking is not allowed along certain curbsides.

“I had to pay $200” to recover the van, Aguilar said.

Now laid off, without even a telephone, Aguilar is making no plans to attend the World Series, even if the Dodgers manage to get there. “I like them a little bit,” he said of the team, “but I can’t go.”